Tesla has repositioned themselves to almost exclusively sell their cars with advanced auto-pilot. The only car that will be sold without AAP will be the $35K base model which has to be ordered as the base plus online and then have the order changed manually by a Tesla sales support person. I'm not sure what to think about this. It is bad for me personally, as I plan to buy a Tesla and don't need or particularly lust after auto pilot, but I think the Tesla strategy of transportation as a service is brilliant. That's the way it's going to go. This seems a bit premature but Elon has said AP will be feature complete this year so perhaps my concern stems from a luddite mindset. Meanwhile, I've been looking over the numbers on the Porsche Taycan and I don't see how they can onboard 350KW of power without damaging their packs. There is no way they will have anything close to the longevity of a Tesla pack. Perhaps the Audi strategy is to build 350KW chargers and current limit them to the maximum capability of the pack (that would be a good strategy) but there is no way a 2020 Taycan pack is going to take 350KW. The folks who think the auto industry simply hasn't taken notice of EV trends and will blow Tesla out of the water once they get serious about production are back markers who simply have no idea of what it takes to build an EV. Hyundai is not going to put Tesla out of business with the Kona. The Kona appears to be a nice car and a great step forward for Hyundai but it is hardly a Tesla beater or even competitor. I'm scared by Tesla's full throttle, hyper-scaling, race to the future but it has been the correct way forward until now and I'm confident it will continue to be so. It's still scary, though. I remain on the 10 year plan.
Here is a video of GF3 that was posted in the last 24 hours. As I understand it, the source material is 3 days old. Still pretty current. It's coming along nicely.
I just saw some drone video that is about 24 hours old. Roof progress continues but seems to have slowed down. The higher section is much further along. The bulk of it is a little further along. Perhaps 80% of the roof is done with 30% of it sheathed.
I almost guessed. Tesla turned around down not reaching 300.00, and I waited short from 315.00. Weekly
The current smear news against Tesla is that Panasonic won't invest in GF1. Since Tesla is cell constrained, this lack of investment has put a cap on Tesla production of all products. Like almost all Tesla news, this is a lie but based on something that is almost true. Here's the reality.... Tesla doesn't want new investment, Panasonic is not withholding, because the dry anode technology they acquired from Maxwell will increase cell production by a multiple. If and once successful, Tesla will be 3 generations ahead of the competition, not two. Tesla will also be either closer to building their own batteries without Panasonic or will have achieved this. We know that Grohman Engineering (Tesla Automation) has developed a pretty good inventory of battery manufacturing systems. I doubt they have dry anode production equipment finished but I have zero doubt they are working on it. I suspect the Model S and X redesigns are waiting for these new cells and we are going to see another significant range bump (perhaps 20% or more). Meanwhile, full self driving is nearly feature complete. They are going to demonstrate full self driving tomorrow, April 22. Expect the price to jump tomorrow but I suspect they will stop trading during the event. The event will have two primary outcomes: 1) A small group of people will have an epiphany, realizing Tesla is not behind the rest of the industry on self driving (as indicated by traditional news sources) but is actually at the front, either tied with Google or a small amount ahead. 2) News sources will heighten their efforts to brand Tesla as a paragon of failure. Keep betting against Tesla. I'm sure they will fail, one of these days. lol!
A parked model s caught fire in Shanghai. Video is circulating the net. Curious this would happen a day before the autonomous driving event. This should throw cold water on the stock price and reduce impact from the event on the stock of competitors.
While seeing a parked Tesla burst into flames is certainly concerning, the stats are that gasoline powered cars are 11x more likely to catch fire. It will be interesting to see if there was some sort of damage to the vehicle or if it was charging at the time that the fire started.
shooooot - I saw a big PUT order go across on Thursday for some May 17ths. I forget what the strike was, but it was like $4M.
Hmm, so the scam here is to take a big put position, then torch your Tesla while getting footage? Make enough to buy a new Tesla!
If you watch the right front fender of the vehicle, from 0:04 you can see smoke puffs from individual cells letting go. This makes the event highly suspicious, IMO. Cells should not be exposed to the open air. Cells are arranged into modules with modules being arranged into a pack. Both modules and packs are sealed. Past combustion events have not been nearly as explosive. Rather, they have burned slower and hotter. In this case, it does appear the module and pack have an external aperture. I think 80% chance this was sabotage.
Well done boys! Now all the investigators have to do is find who made the big put trades and mystery solved!
This fire is suspect for many reasons. It appears to be in the basement of a parking garage. I'm going to go out on a limb and speculate the car was outside of LTE coverage due to it's location, preventing Tesla from monitoring the situation in real time. Teslas have a black box. Hopefully, the box is still intact and recoverable so Tesla can do further analysis. It would be a shame if that black box were to have gotten lost...
Autonomy day is extremely fertile ground. Power consumption is of particular interest. Power consumption is constant for FSD (full self driving) while power consumption for locomotion varies with speed. Because of this, the range impact of a self driving car varies with speed. On the freeway, FSD will have minimal impact to rage. In a traffic jam, FSD could use more power than locomotion. For this reason, Tesla believes their custom hardware and software platform has a tremendous power advantage over generalised solutions. I don't fully understand why Tesla is going through such gruelling detail on their hardware and software platform. They literally did a breakdown of on-die components of their neural net accelerator. BTW, it's 14 nano FinFET with 6B transistors, for those who care...
Elon just indicated Tesla will introduce a battery pack next year that will be validated for 1M miles of operation. That's about double the current expected longevity. Maxwell for the win. Meanwhile, media sources continue to discuss a car fire in a Shanghai parking garage.
If true, then revolution has truly begun. Just need to speed up the charging time and make them less explodey!
